The rules we follow
We mirror official filings.
What you see is what was filed with the government — a campaign's FEC reports, a roll-call vote — shown as filed, not reworded. Filings get amended, so "as filed" is not the same as "guaranteed true": we show the record as it stood on the date we retrieved it, and that date is always on the tag.
When we do math, we use official categories.
Some figures are sums — total raised, total spent, the "where the money comes from" breakdown. We only add up numbers the source itself reports, using the FEC's own categories and codes. We never sort a candidate's money into labels we invented, and we don't merge donors or tag them by industry — that would mean guessing.
We don't guess.
When there is no official record of something, we say exactly that — "no record on file" — instead of leaving a blank or filling the gap with an estimate. And if a figure can't carry its source and date, it doesn't go on the site.
The sources
Federal Election Commission (FEC)
LiveCampaign money: every dollar a federal campaign reports raising and spending — and where it came from — as filed with the FEC.
Congress.gov
LiveVotes and bills: the official record of Congress — how a member voted, and the bills they've sponsored. Covers sitting House members; challengers have no voting record, and Senate votes aren't included yet.
U.S. Census Bureau
LiveYour district: the Census Bureau's geocoder, which matches your address to your congressional district.
Every figure on this site carries a small tag naming its source and the date we retrieved it. Records change; the tag tells you exactly how fresh ours is. When the tag is a link, it opens the official record it came from, so you can check us.
We use official sources only. Nothing here is scraped from third-party sites or bought from commercial data vendors.
What we'll never do
Tell you how to vote.
No scores, no ratings, no rankings, no endorsements. Every candidate gets the same format and the same visual weight. We put what a candidate says next to what the record shows — and leave the judgment with you.
Paint anyone red or blue.
Party affiliation is shown as filed, in words. We never use color as a political signal.
Turn contributor data into a mailing list.
Federal law says contributor information from FEC reports may not be used to solicit donations or for commercial purposes. We follow that rule and build it in. Money from individual donors appears on this site only as totals — never as named people. When a contributor is named, it's a political committee, named as it appears in the filing. If individual contributor names ever appear here, they will carry city and state only — never street addresses. And we build no export, no list-making, and no "contact these donors" features. That's why every page showing contributor data carries this notice: "Contributor data is shown for voter information only — not for solicitation or commercial use."
What happens to your address
Your address is used once to find your district, then discarded — we never store it.
Here's the whole trip: you type your address, it goes to our server, and our server asks the U.S. Census Bureau's geocoder which congressional district contains it. Your district is the only thing that comes back. On our side, the address is gone the moment the lookup ends — we never store it, never log it, never use it for anything else. The Census Bureau processes the lookup under its own federal confidentiality rules.
If you save a lookup, it is saved on your device only and never leaves it — we can't see your saved lookups. There are no accounts on this site.
What we cover so far
We'd rather show you a short honest list than a long padded one.
Today this site covers federal races, plus Michigan's Governor, State Senate, and State House races, for Michigan's 2026 elections — the August 4, 2026 primary and the November 3, 2026 general election (dates and certification deadlines from the Michigan Secretary of State's election calendar). Michigan's primary is open: voters don't declare a party in advance — you pick a party privately in the voting booth and can vote for candidates of only one party (Michigan Bureau of Elections, Election Officials Manual). Who appears on a primary ballot is certified by Michigan election officials — minor parties nominate at conventions and independent candidates qualify by petition for the November ballot.
Once Michigan certifies a ballot, we cross-check it against FEC filings — see how we determine who's actually on the ballot below. Until then, candidate lists show every FEC filing grouped by filed party affiliation — not an official ballot.
Candidate profiles show who a candidate is, how their campaign is funded, a sitting House member's roll-call votes and sponsored bills, and a link to their campaign website as filed with the FEC. Challengers have no voting record yet, and Senate votes aren't included. More states appear as their official data lands — never before.
Below the state's own listing, there's no official, machine-readable candidate source at any level. School board, city, township, and village candidates file with roughly 1,500 local clerks; most county offices and precinct delegates file with one of 83 county clerks — each in its own format, with no statewide feed. Michigan's own ballot-lookup tool (MVIC) proves the state collects this internally, but it's public only during election windows and isn't built for outside access. Rather than scrape hundreds of inconsistent local sources, we link out to them instead: see your complete official sample ballot at Michigan.gov/Vote, or find your county clerk's candidate listing.
Judicial races — circuit, district, and probate court — appear on Michigan's official candidate listing, but we don't show them here yet. They're nonpartisan, use a different identity format than partisan races, and court districts have no official address-matching source yet. We'll add them once we can place them honestly.
The demo pages use clearly labeled sample data to show how the product works — nothing in the demo is a real filing.
One email at launch if you want it — get notified as coverage grows.
How we determine who's actually on the ballot
An FEC filing is a campaign-finance registration — it doesn't expire when a candidacy ends, and there's no FEC mechanism for withdrawing one. Whether someone is actually on a Michigan ballot is a separate, state-law fact the FEC has no part in.
Michigan's Bureau of Elections publishes an official candidate listing for each election. We cross-check every FEC filing against it. A candidate can be listed as qualified (shown here as "on the ballot"), disqualified, or withdrawn — those are the state's own flags, mirrored as filed. A filer who doesn't appear on the listing at all is shown as not on the ballot. Certification dates come from the Michigan Secretary of State's election calendar (Michigan Compiled Laws 168.552 for the primary, 168.581 for the general).
Matching a listing row to an FEC filing is mechanical, not a guess: we auto-match only when the race, party, surname, and given name line up unambiguously; anything else waits for a human to confirm it, and shows as "not yet cross-checked" in the meantime. We never invent a match.
Two things we don't cover: ballot order — candidates are listed alphabetically here, never in the order they'll appear on the printed ballot — and write-in candidates, who can be validly voted for without appearing on Michigan's official candidate listing at all, and so may show here as not on the ballot even when they are a valid write-in choice.